A note from the typist: These are my great-uncle Leroy's stories. One Saturday in June I set a cassette recorder on the liars' bench beside him and let it run until the tape quit, and then I typed up the best of it at my kitchen table. I didn't change his words except to take out about eleven "and"s per story. He says if anybody catches him in a fact, they should write to me, because he's not answerable for what the machine says. — Catherine Plemmons, grand-niece

The Rules of the Liars' Bench

The bench has been in front of Bramlett's Feed & Seed since before the war, and it had rules before I ever sat on it. I didn't make them up. I only follow them, which is more than some.

1. No lie gets told twice the same way. If you can't improve it, give it a rest.
2. Nobody laughs until the teller does. That's manners.
3. Nobody calls a man a liar on the bench. It's understood. Saying it out loud is just showing off.
4. If a man is going to tell a true story, he has to say so first, so nobody is embarrassed for him.
5. The bench holds five. The sixth man stands, and the standing man goes first, so he can sit down sooner.
6. Ladies are welcome, and generally better at it.

A Little About Me

I was born in 1916 in a four-room house on a creek that I won't name, because the fish there are still minding their own business and I'd like to keep it that way. I served in the Army in France and Germany. I don't tell lies about that, so you needn't ask. I came home in the spring of 1946, sat down on this bench the first week, and I've been on it most days since, except for the thirty-one years I carried the mail on a rural route out of the post office here, and even then I was on it Saturdays.

My wife Ruth passed on in 1994. She could tell a better lie than any man on this bench and never once let on, which is the highest form of the art.

The regulars these days are Levi Winfrey, who is ninety and claims to remember the Civil War, Nolan Bramlett, whose daddy built the store, Don Craig, and Rudolph Tomlin, who is sixty-five and so we call him the boy. Since the interstate went around us, most of the traffic on the old road is tourists out looking for it. They're welcome on the bench too. A good many of them have told us lies about California.

The Winter the Words Froze

The winter of 1936 was a cold one, and that's not a lie, you can look it up. What they don't put in the books is that it got so cold in February that the words froze coming out of people's mouths.

You'd say good morning to a man and it would come out in a little puff and freeze stiff and drop on the ground, clink, like a piece of ice off the eaves. He couldn't hear it. He'd have to pick it up and take it in by the stove and thaw it in his hand to find out what you'd said, and by then you'd generally gone on down the road.

It made for a quiet winter. Courting was a misery. A boy would go calling and stand on the porch and say all the sweet things he'd been practicing, and they'd pile up around his boots like hailstones, and the girl's mother would come out with a broom and sweep them off the porch before her daughter could get to them. More than one marriage in this county got put off till spring on account of it.

The preacher at our church gave a sermon every Sunday that winter, all to himself, and the words dropped down and covered the floor of the pulpit, and the deacons shoveled them into feed sacks and stacked them in the church cellar to keep. My daddy cussed his mule one morning in the barn lot, and Mama made him go out with a spade and bury every word of it behind the smokehouse.

Well, in April it warmed up all at once. The sacks in the church cellar thawed out on a Wednesday night, during prayer meeting, and the whole congregation got eight weeks of sermons in about forty minutes, coughs and all. Folks said it was the best preaching they ever sat through, because it was over by nine.

And behind the smokehouse, where Daddy's words were buried, nothing would grow for three years. Mama said the ground was ashamed of itself.

The Mosquito That Took Our Boat

This was the summer of 1952, on the Gasconade River, and I was fishing out of a johnboat with James Carrico, who is gone now and can't defend himself, so you'll have to take my word.

The mosquitoes were bad that year. You've heard people say a mosquito was as big as a sparrow. Ours were bigger than the people who said that. We were anchored below a gravel bar at sundown when one of them came down out of the sycamores, and the light went out like a cloud had gone over, and it lit on the front seat of the boat.

James took a swing at it with the paddle. The mosquito took the paddle away from him and laid it in the bottom of the boat, the way you'd take a stick from a child. Then it looked at us for a while, and I believe it was trying to make up its mind. And then it took hold of both gunwales and lifted.

We went over the side, James on one side and me on the other, and we stood there in the river up to our belts and watched that mosquito carry our johnboat off over the treetops, with the anchor rope dragging behind and the minnow bucket swinging off the end of it.

We walked home. It was four miles. James never said a word the whole way, which was a first.

Eleven years later I was hunting squirrels down that same river and I looked up, and there in the top of the tallest sycamore on the bend was our boat. It was full of little mosquitoes, about the size of banty hens, all asleep, and the biggest of them had learned to work the oarlocks and was rocking the rest of them back and forth.

I didn't ask for it back. A boat ought to be used, and they were using it.

Biscuit, the Fastest Hound in Missouri

I had a redbone hound named Biscuit that was the fastest dog that ever lived, and that is a fact everybody on this bench will swear to, because they've all heard me say it.

He was so fast that when I called him, he'd be sitting at my feet before I'd finished saying his name. Then the rest of the name would get there, and he'd look all around to see who was calling him, and he never did figure it out.

When we went rabbit hunting, he'd catch the rabbit before the rabbit had decided to run. It wasn't sporting. The rabbits in our part of the county got so they wouldn't come out of the brush unless they'd seen me go into town first.

I had to tie him to slow him down. I tried a length of chain, and he ran so fast the chain stood straight out behind him like a flag. I tried tying an old flatiron to his collar, and he dragged it till it was worn down to the size of a dime. Finally Ruth tied him to the porch post with a piece of clothesline, and he ran around that post one morning so fast he wound himself up tight against it, and then he unwound, and then he wound up again the other way, and he did that until he'd run a groove in the post you could lay your arm in. He was happy as could be. He thought he was going somewhere.

When I started carrying the mail, Biscuit came along with me on the route. Trouble was, he'd run the whole sixty-two miles before I'd got the car started, and he'd bark at every mailbox, and folks would come out and stand by the road waiting for a letter. By the time I got there they'd been standing an hour, and they blamed me.

He lived to be sixteen. He'd have lived longer, but the years caught up with him, and that was the only thing that ever did.

You are listener number

since July 1999. Uncle Leroy says that's more people than ever stopped in front of the feed store, and he doesn't believe it.

If you have a lie of your own you'd like to send, or just want to say hello to the bench,
write Catherine and she'll read it out to them on a Saturday:
[email protected]

Last updated September 11, 1999